It's been quite a little time here; the newest news on the teaching front? Well, today, I did my first substitute gigs in a special education classroom, which, quite frankly, was a relatively painless endeavor. The kids were all fairly high-functioning, and seemingly on their best behavior, even given that I spent the morning in a middle school special-ed classroom, and the afternoon in an elementary special-ed classroom, after the elementary teacher had some personal business to attend to. Hey, if I can deal with my own daughters, I can deal with kids who have a diagnosed REASON for being unpredictably moody and ill-tempered at times. The bigger adventure was that into Dearborn's Edsel Ford High School bilingual classroom. First of all, it was the first ever, up-close-and-big-as-life encounter with conservative Muslim females, those with the all-black attire, and full headgear that only left their eyes visible. That was a shocker. Not for any reasons that ever would have caused me to mistrust them, on the contrary, they were well-mannered, enthusiastic and overall, very good students. Mostly it was just that sight. Something you've only seen in magazines is suddenly right there in your face. And, in the case of one young lady, full-length headgear notwithstanding, judging by her gestures, and the way her head was bobbing back and forth, she was obviously laughing gleefully at something. Geez, I wonder what her dad would think.

The males in the same class could be somewhat sneaky and underhanded in that teenage-schoolboy kind of way if they wanted to be, but I'm also quite certain, that if I'm ever in Dearborn, and one of my students spots me, it's going to be, "Hey, Mr. K., how are you?!" They seemed to really like me, overall, perhaps because I did my best to integrate my usual ESL teacher style into their normal teacher's lesson plan, much of which focused on literature, and related issues like character development, conflict resolution and onomotopaeia; overall, as kids whose families probably haven't been in this country a great length of time, I don't think they quite GET their normal teacher's lessons entirely, based on their reactions to me. The object of ESL in most places, at least the way *I'VE* encountered it, is for these kids to be able to speak and write in ways that will not draw the ire of your average American, if any such reaction is possible.

And I really do feel compelled to mention, that in this age of teenage boys in tuner hot-rod Hondas and Nissans and such, it did my heart good to see one of these Edsel Ford kids driving one of the legitimately fine small sports cars ever produced, the early-70s Opel GT. If you're unfamiliar with them, well, first of all, Opel hasn't been a brand in America since the early 80s, but anyway, circles exist where the Opel GT has been dubbed "the poor man's Corvette," for it's diminuitive, yet muscular and dare I say sexy appearance. Those that weren't crashed or rust-eaten in the first 10 years of their existence were subsequently garaged and coddled to within an inch of their little lives, only to be driven on the most beautiful of summer days, or trailered from one car show to another. If you look at the image above, well, you be the judge.